The ancient fishing village of Tianjin was razed to make room for a mini Manhattan called Yujiapu Financial District, which developers hoped would become the financial center of the world.

In the heart of Beijing is Tonghui Town International Bar Street, a street modeled after the scenic Swiss town of Interlaken (with Bavarian and other Alpine influences).

It was meant to house dozens of bars and restaurants in order to become the new after-work hotspot. It didn’t, and today it’s deserted.

Courtesy of Su Landscape

Cobbled streets, Victorian homes, and corner pubs make Thames Town, in the Songjiang District near Shanghai, feel supremely English.

Some of the buildings are exact replicas of those found in England. It, like a few more towns on this list, is part of the„One City, Nine Towns“ residential project, which was meant to lure people out of overcrowded Shanghai to live out their European fantasies in one of nine Europe-inspired villages.

Huai-Chun Hsu/Wikipedia

Rather than building some castle-clad Germanic storybook village, the German architects hired to build Anting German Town, outside Shanghai, decided to be practical and build a modern German Town in China.

Also known as Pudong's Nederland, Holland Town is a pastiche village made of Dutch stereotypes pulled from Amsterdam and the Kattenbroek neighborhood of Amersfoort, complete with canals and windmills.

Some buildings are exact replicas of those found in the Netherlands, like the Netherlands Maritime Museum and the Bijenkorf department store in Amsterdam.

Sheng Li/Reuters

Sweden was also knocked off as part of the overly ambitious "One City, Nine Towns" project.

Located outside Shanghai, the North Europe Town is meant to resemble the Swedish town of Sigtuna and has Scandinavian influences, including a replica of Sweden’s Lake Malaren and Iceland’s House of Parliament. Today, it’s a ghost town.

Flickr/Drew Bates

The Italian architects of Breeza Citta di Pujiang, also located outside of Shanghai, created a town that's meant to resemble a modern-day Italian city.

The result had mostly blocky apartment buildings with a few scenic canals and green spaces.